When I was growing up I spent every other Christmas and a couple of weeks each summer at my paternal grandparents’ farm in northern Arkansas. There was a series of things I’d always do every time I was there: have endless adventures in the big red barn my great-grandfather had built shortly after the turn of the century, construct buildings with the set of original Lincoln Logs kept in an old cardboard box at the back of the living room closet, and read the same paperbacks kicking around in that same closet like Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, The Hobbit, anything by Wilbur Smith or even the ancient World Book Encyclopedia that was perpetually bowing the bottom shelf almost to the point of collapse.

But, hands down, the book I always looked forward to rereading every time I was there was a thirty-five cent Dell paperback anthology from 1954 edited by Groff Conklin: Six Great Short Novels of Science Fiction.